Today enterprise based and carrier based telephony systems work on the principle of an originating switch with a set of call origination features and a terminating switch with a specific set of terminating features. Unfortunately there is no mechanism for the originating switch to signal the terminating switch to apply or disable specific terminating feature for a particular call. A similar situation applies with telephony switching system for intra switch calls. In this case, the switch has call origination software processes and call termination software processes but there is no mechanism to signal between these process regarding which terminating features should be applied on a particular call. There are several existing and proposed telephony services, which would benefit by the ability for the originating switch or software process to be able to signal to the terminating switch or software process as to which terminating features should be applied. These include automatic initiation of a multiparty conference call and simultaneously ringing multiple phones (e.g. home phone and mobile phone) when a single number is dialed.
Today enterprise based and carrier based telephony systems enable users to manually set up on demand conference calls to three or more parties. To establish the conference call, the initiator individually dials each intended participant. The initiator must confirm that the intended party answers the phone. The initiator then signals the network to add that party to the conference bridge. The initiator can then either join the conference bridge of continue adding additional participants.
The existing process of manually establishing a conference call between three or more participants has many drawbacks. Some of these drawbacks are as follows:
(1) The initiator must manually signal the network the number for each participant. The initiator must confirm that each participant answers the phone.
(2) If a participant's phone is busy or is not answered, the initiator must be able to manually terminate that call attempt. Otherwise all conference call participants will hear the busy tone or ring tone.
(3) If the called participant is not available (busy or no answer) and has a voice mail service, the call might be transferred to a voice mail system. Consequently if the initiator receives a voice mail system greeting, the initiator must be able to manual terminate that call attempt.
(4) If the call to a participant is not completed due to network congestion or incorrectly dialed digits, the call will receive network announcements. Again the initiator must be able to recognize these problems and terminate the call attempt.
(5) Manually placing calls to each participant and confirming answer is a time consuming process. It can take several minutes to manually contact and add all of the parties to the conference call. During this process of adding participants to the conference bridge, the participants already on the conference bridge are not able to monitor the initiator's activities. Consequently if there is an extended period in which the initiator is attempting to contact another participant, the participants on the conference bridge may hang up or abandon the conference call.
In contrast is would be very desirable if a user could automatically initiate a call to a number of people. For example, a group of people may be specified and a request may be made of a switch to individually call each of them at the same time and as they answer add them to a conference bridge.
A problem occurs, for example, when a person is called and they do not answer. The call may then automatically go to a voice mail system. Now those who are already connected to the bridge will hear the voice mail system announcement, which is undesirable. Consequently it would be beneficial if the originating switch could signal the terminating switch that for this call certain terminating features should be disabled. For example if the call is not answered or the line is busy do not forward the call to voice mail. If the call reaches a busy line, play the busy signal for a few seconds and then disconnect the call.
Another situation in which it would be beneficial for the originating switch to signal the terminating switch regarding which terminating features should be applied is the Simultaneous Ring feature. With simultaneous ringing, the called party can designate one or more phones that should ring when a particular phone is called. For example, when a home phone is called, a related mobile phone also rings. Whichever one is answered first gets the call and the other one stops ringing. But a problem occurs when the mobile phone is turned off, or when the mobile phone has lost registration with the mobile phone network. In this situation, the switch that servers the mobile phone will immediately send the call to voice mail, and the home phone does not ring. Consequently it would be beneficial for the switch that initiated the Simultaneous Ringing of the mobile phone to be able to send a message to the terminating switch for the mobile phone that this call should not invoke Call Forward not Registered.